Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Robert Zildjian

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who has died aged 85, was a writer of satirical novels
that charted the exile’s experience of foreign cultures, and a Merchant
Ivory stalwart responsible for the screenplays of such classics as Howards
End, A Room with a View and The Remains of the Day. As such she was the only
person to win both the Booker and an Oscar.

Jewish by birth, she grew up in Germany and then England before marrying an
Indian architect and settling in Delhi, so her choice of theme was hardly
surprising. She wrote 13 novels, seven collections of short stories and
about 20 screenplays, two of which won Academy Awards.

The best of Prawer Jhabvala’s books were set in India and her earlier novels
centred on the petty snobberies, self–delusion and close family ties of
post-colonial Indian society, to which she later added the ambivalent
experiences of “seekers” — westerners who